Construction Update

465 North Park Looks Just Lobely

It hasn’t been that long, but it’s already time for another update on the construction of 465 North Park.

In our last update, we were just starting to be able to see that this isn’t going to be yet another collection of rectangles glued together (apologies to its neighbor, the North Water Apartments/Loews Hotel Tower). No, thanks to Pappageorge Haymes‘ multi-lobed design, 465 has more curves than a Vegas chorus line.

465 North Park under construction (Courtesy of Joe Zekas/YoChicago!)

In the photo above that Joe Zekas at YoChicago! took from the Optima Signature Tower, you can see the northwest and southeast lobes of the building stretch across the property on the corner of East Illinois Street and North Park Drive (for some reason listed as “Park Street” in Apple Maps). You can also see how the building’s driveway will travel underneath the amenity deck. While this reduces the amount of ground floor retail space available, the way it’s configured will help keep traffic off of an already congested Illinois Street.

When complete, the tower being built for Jupiter Realty, MetLife, and Allstate will have 444 homes across 48 floors, with a good sized 12,000 square feet of retail space, and 181 parking spaces.

One hundred eighty-one parking spaces is a little under 2½ residences per space. That may seem like a lot in a neighborhood with very good bus service and the walkability of living inside a shopping mall. But Chicago is building more and more three-bedroom apartments, and this tower has some of them.

Three bedrooms means families. Often elderly relatives living with expats, or young families shunning the suburbs and bringing up baby in the concrete jungle. And as nice as it was to be a ten-year-old freely roaming the N and R subway lines when I was growing up in New York, today’s extended urban families really do need a set of (hopefully electric) wheels to take the wee ones to daycare, and take grandma to that other place that we’re not supposed to call daycare.